Cryptocurrencies (I)

The current cryptocurrency market is immersed in euphoria. All the talk is about how great blockchain and cryptocurrencies will become, how they will capture the financial market, and the whole world in general. But all this is in the future tense. The public has expectations that the cryptocurrency will become a convenient means of payment.

Cryptocurrencies can evolve into something much larger

In fact, now we have an opposite picture, now cryptocurrencies are inconvenient. It is much easier to use a smartphone or a card, instead of buying cryptocurrencies, opening a wallet, bothering with tracking the course, facing problems of the receiving party – lack of legislation, tax practices, and so on.

Cryptocurrencies today are at the level of a concept that can evolve into something more. Investors expect that cryptocurrency will become something great, like social networks in due time, and then with the increase in the user base, the value of the asset will also increase. But what should happen for it to become applicable? It should be easy and convenient.

For example, Telegram is simple and convenient. And there is the Signal messenger – superanonymous, but not so convenient. Therefore, it is used by much less people. People are beings in a good way lazy. They do not need unfinished products. No one will delve into private keys, backups, and the like. While it takes more than 15 minutes to explain what cryptocurrency is, this will seem to most nonsense.

Criptomonede

The first task that cryptocurrencies should solve is ease of use

This should be an analogue of Paypal. Enter by login and password. Clear interface. There is no need to bother with long incomprehensible addresses. To have a list of friends – a kind of financial social network. Fiat (money) gateways are also needed in order to exchange cryptocurrencies for regular money easily.

All cryptocurrencies are now actually at the level of a certain concept

All people on earth will need “smart-contracts”, or a real estate registry on the blockchain, or something else. These are “assumption-dreams” that may or may not be realized. But the fact that people need private and independent money from the state is an idea that has already confirmed its relevance. The popularity of Bitcoin for a long time seems to confirm this very idea. Therefore, there are other cryptocurrencies that are trying to occupy such a niche in the currency and payment function. Some of them has already solved the problem of speed of payments, solved the problem of anonymity, solved the problem of self-management and self-financing. The next planned stage is to solve the problem of ease of use. Dash can be such an example. Even your grandmother should be able to use Dash. So that a person, barely learning about cryptocurrency, could immediately start using it.

An important property of cryptocurrency is the possibility of wide participation in their development. You can do something of your own and if people decide that they need it, they will simply begin to use it. Dash is moving in that direction. The task of Dash now is to create a decentralized program interface, so that everyone has the opportunity to do something on the basis of this platform. This ensures the freedom to create innovations.

Banks, Credits, Inflation

Ultimately, users decide everything. Whatever crypto will be more convenient for them, they will use. If a cryptocurrency appears, like Bitcoin or Dash, only with a different emission model and people think that such a model is better, then it has every chance of becoming more popular or even the main one. Many believe that at the moment the main problem of global finance is inflation and the imposition of strict rules for the use of money. And cryptocurrencies are primarily trying to solve the problem of avoiding centralized control over emissions. This is their main value. Bitcoin and Dash in this way provide something valuable, something that is not in current financial systems.

The Bitcoin and Dash emission model is similar to the decreasing “emission” of gold, the same elliptical curve. We have limited resources of gold. Same here – the maximum Bitcoin emission is limited to 21 million tokens, in Dash – 19 million. This is a way of protection from inflation, but in other projects you can program other emission options, unlimited or with inflation at a certain level.

Many draw an analogy of the development of the cryptocurrency sphere with the development of the Internet. At the dawn of the Internet, it was difficult to imagine such functionalities as geolocation or social networks. Therefore, it is difficult for us to imagine the future prospects of the new cryptocurrency technology. We say that the blockchain technology will reduce dependence on intermediaries, will give more freedom and rights in the hands of users. This may be applicable in the banking sector. If everything goes the way we see it, then it will be an opportunity to move away from centralized control over these processes. It is the users who will decide how to manage their money, and this decision will depend only on them, and not on any organizations, including banks. Accordingly, if banks will be able to restructure their business model to work in the new environment – they will be able to use cryptocurrency, including for loans. Most likely, not one emission model will be used, but several at once: one for crediting, the other for saving, the third for payments. It is even possible that we will observe dual systems, by analogy with gold-silver.

However, the cryptocurrency market is still very far from determining the final winner-pioneer – be it Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash or TON, we are only at the very beginning of the path. In the next 10–20 years the most interesting competition awaits us and for the first time in history we have the real chance of choosing the true winner without the slightest doubt about the results due to the blockchain technology.